/tgesg/ - Weekend Elder Scrolls General

King Dead Wolf-Deer.

>Stri'Ker, the Khajiit scholar, and a scholar named Mafafu travel to the High Rock to procure the antlers of the King Dead Wolf-Deer. Ainoryl gives information about the antlers, he says, "King Dead Wolf-Deer is one of the surviving monster-mer of the Wild Hunt that slew Borgas of Skyrim. He is thus one of the oldest creatures in Tamriel, and therefore no trifle. That he exists still to haunt High Rock thousands of years later speaks to the danger of retrieving his antler-crown."

This would actually be great.
Interestingly, by the time of PGE1 (Tiber Wars), KDWD was reported "stalking the Lympan March" in Valenwood.

The Lympan March also appears in...
forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1327164-better-is-a-better-word-the-lynpan-march/

So what, this marsh doesn't even exist anymore?
Most interesting.

Maybe it slid all the way to High Rock.

PGE2 is all kind of "adjacent place" crazy though.

How playable is the fanmade TES tabletop game (the one based on dark heresy)? I'd love to give it a try

I just want to perform my duties as a Knight of the Dragon, and socialize at the Temple of Kynareth. Probably take down a local witch coven, or some orc "mercenaries" we know they're just thugs. No pigfaces allowed in Daggerfall.

It's fully playable. There are still some more supplementary books coming out, though, I think.

I think that the different groups within Highrock are interesting. The Bjoulsae Horse People in particular seem to be very interesting, and I really wish that there was more information about their culture other than fighting technique and concern with spirits. The Witchmen of the Reach also sounded a lot more interesting before Skyrim.

Shame that the only book we have about that is The Mirror, which is part of the reason it's one of my favorites.

"Imperials" are already the two races of "Colovian" and "Nibenese," I guess since they are physically similar they just take up one race slot in character creation.

>Elder Scrolls lore used to be this super deep thing with even a tiny area being populated by numerous ethnic groups with a believable local history and weird stuff like witchcraft and folk traditions rising from magic being the cornerstone of development, rather than magic just being an alternative to technology
>because they wanted to make a "highly detailed" (kind of bland and empty, but fully 3d rendered) world for morrowind they dumbed everything down to "there's like four groups and they're all fighting and you're the chosen one!!!"
>all of the interesting rough edges of the lore were just cut off and the edges polished to leave almost nothing but muh chim and muh dualism
>in subsequent games it's gone from four factions to two
>magic is just a very mechanical, fully understood thing, rather than a mostly understood thing that still has some whacky fringe shit involved
>loads of minor and even major deities aren't even mentioned again, or worse, are alluded to but mysteriously no trace of their actual cults (or any equivalent local cults remain after the years interceding Daggerfall and Morrowind, suggesting at best that everywhere but the Illiac Bay area has a washed out homogeneous culture and that that specific area is the only cool one
>dragons retconned extinct because they were too hard to animate as fully functioning enemies in morrowind (though that didn't stop them with literally every other creature in morrowind)
>retconned not-quite-extinct and immortal and coming back and nord culture retconned to be completely dragon-centric so Skyrim could key in on flavour of the month shit (par for the course after the retcon of Cyrodiil from jungle to shire, just even more cynical and depressing)
It's pretty disappointing imotbqhwyrnfyi.

You seem to be a little confused. TES pre-Morrowind isn't
>this super deep thing with even a tiny area being populated by numerous ethnic groups with a believable local history and weird stuff like witchcraft and folk traditions rising from magic being the cornerstone of development

What you're describing is TES circa Morrowind. The Mirror, for example, is from Morrowind. Despite Daggerfall taking place in a much larger worldspace, there is virtually no depth to any of the cultures in the game. All of this was brought to the table with the development of Morrowind and the release of Redguard and the PGE(1). Developers with a grasp of history and comparative religion took the reigns of the franchise. Disingenuously simplifying the plot of Morrowind isn't doing you any favors.
Everything else you're describing is a symptom of the game development process, never actually existed in any TES game, or are the faults of Bethesda that began largely after the release of Morrowind.

...

t morrowindbaby

Sorry mate but you're absolutely wrong. Go actually play Daggerfall. Morrowind is only deep or complex or detailed compared to Oblivion and Skyrim.

The "church" of the Eight Divines

Not sure how you got so misinformed, but it was Morrowind (and Redguard) that added so much depth to the world of Tamriel. In fact, compared to the rest of the world it's the Iliac By area that is the most homogenized. Daggerfall era lore was extremely shallow in every respect except the politics of Wayrest/Sentinel/Daggerfall. It wasn't until Redguard/Morrowind that we got all the sub-cultures and detailed history to most races and provinces. Before that there was no Imperial races of any sort, no concept of dragonborns or thu'um, no hist, no Anequina and Pellitine nations or Khajiit moon cycle connection, and most interestingly of all not even the goddamned Bjoulsae Horse People in the post you quoted that triggered your complaints. All of the above and so much more unmentioned is Morrowind-era lore.

Hell, even parts of the Iliac Bay itself having any semblance of unique culture and their own minor dieties is Morrowind-era lore. Satakalam for example was just a country in Hammerfell, same as all the others. It wasn't until Morrowind's "Varieties of Faith" and Redguard's pocket guide that the serpent gof Satakal was introduced to the lore, with some of his most devoted followers greusomely shedding their own skin, getting on the ground, and slithering great distances like snakes. Daggerfall-era Hammerfell didn't have gods like that or their Redguard Pantheon of Tall Papa and his children. Instead, they had the same gods as everyone else with temples to specific divines strewn across the landscape, being the same as High Rock when it comes to culture in every way except for architecture.

Morrowind added breadth, not depth. It took a single story and like three metaphysical concepts (lifted directly from the works of Aleister Crowley) and spread them across an entire continent. Broad as an ocean, deep as a puddle.

Not him (I'm ), but I've played the fuck out of Daggerfall and read every single book in the game. It's my favorite in the series when it comes to gameplay. I even went and added word-wrapping to the many books that had words running off the pages so I could fully read them in-game.

But when it comes to lore, history, cultures, religions, Daggerfall has virtually no "depth" or "complexity" compared to the later games and especially Morrowind.

I wonder if you've even played Morrowind or read any of its dialogue or books because that CHIM and other metaphysical bullshit isn't even 5% of what it added to the lore. I'm talking about actual history, culture, heroes, and conflicts for all of Tamriel's civilizations, including the ones in High Rock and Hammerfell. Morrowind's depth dwarfs Daggerfall's in that regard. Even comparing ONLY the Dunmer as presented in Morrowind to the Bretons and Redguards as presented in Daggerfall, it's not even close.

I think you got the definitions of "depth" and "breadth" completely reversed up somehow, friend. Daggerfall is the broad one, with 20+ countries but only two cultures between them, with all Bretons having the same names, style of dress, and architecture and all Redguards having their own. And that's where the distinctions end since both Bretons and Redguards all have the same factions, quests, dialogue, etc.

There's also the Orc stronghold with its handful of quests as part of the main quest, and the Witch Covens dotted across the landscape which all, again, say the same exact things and offer the same quests between each other. Same story with the vampire clans, all the same except in name and stat bonuses.

Morrowind, on the other hand, is the deep one, with a focus on one island in one nation and going into great detail on the many cultures of its natives, and their relationshios with the historic Nord invaders and the modern Imperial colonists. Even the vampire clans have their own unique quests and dialogue. This is actually a perfect example of bredth vs. depth since we can see that both Daggerfall and Morrowind have the same amount of total vampire content. Daggerfall chose to put it all into a pool shared by its several clans, while Morrowind chose to split it between three clans to give them each their own unique characters and quests.

Another good example of breadth vs. depth is in how they handled gods. Daggerfall had eight gods, ostensibly each being their own religion with temples dedicated to them, and several knightly orders to serve the royal families of certain areas. Of course the knightly orders are all exactly the same in every way except for their location, and the Temples are all the same except for one unique quest per temple; all other quests are generic "religious" quests shared by every single temple. Three of the eight temples also offer services not found in the others, which is at least more than we can say for the knightly orders.

Morrowind, again, chose to sacrifice Daggerfall's breadth in the service of added depth. The Knightly Orders were all consolidated into the Imperial Legion, with a similar amount of content but all of it is unique to specific forts and deal with the legion's interests in each area. Likewise, the eight temples were consolidated into one religion that worships all of them, but offers unique quests, some of which are in service to a specific divine while others, as in Daggerfall, are more general to all of them.

Then they added something that had no analogue in Daggerfall: a totally different religion with its own unique beliefs, worshippers, and quests. To join them you go on a pilgrimage around the world, learning about how they came to be and their judeo-christian-esque relationship to their predecessor religion which is still followed by ashlanders and researched by dissident priests.

Even that one new religion has more depth than all of Daggerfall's religious factions combined, and they included them in addition to Morrowind's analogue and expansion of those religions: the Imperial Cult.

They also added the political factions of the great houses, once again having no analogue in Daggerfall. Indeed, Morrowind actually has more joinable factions than its predecessor when you account for the copy-pasted Daggerfall temples and orders.

pastebin.com/U6ph0g5c

And that's without going into dialogue, actual events of the story, factions you can join (such as knightly orders) and their descriptions, the various witches' covens, the different attitudes of each region's royal court and so forth- The gameplay was very shallow, and for instance every knightly order boiled down to radiant quests, but the narrative was vastly deep. Morrowind had five guilds, three houses, three vampiric orders, of which one of each (three guilds for stealth) were slight flavour variations on the same core principles, and the tribunal vs the imperial cult.

Pretty much all Morrowind sports of its own that it doesn't at least ideologically owe to Daggerfall is the 36 Lessons, and even those not for the lore they introduce (which is extremely shallow and frankly kind of lame, it's literally just a couple of basic mental shits lifted off of Crowley) but for the way it is written, as a kind of novella-length riddle with many cleverly intertwined parts and hidden messages. Redguard isn't as bad, but it's still panning out to "big picture with some really homogeneous metaphysical theology" instead of the insane attention to detail and cohesion that Daggerfall's lore got. Daggerfall made Tamriel feel like a place that had been populated with various interacting civilisations for thousands of years like the Mediterranean, Morrowind onward make it feel like it's a single young nation that supplanted the local population a few hundred years ago like the United States. Morrowind itself actually has an excuse for this, to be fair, in that it actually takes place on Vvardenfell which has only (relatively) recently been colonised by anything but dwarves. The PGE was a great outline or teaser for the regions (or would have been, if they actually regarded it as much as they should), but it ultimately did not add much depth.

What is the best magical discipline and why is it alchemy?

>Daggerfall had eight gods
Daggerfall had far more than that.

Anyway, you're talking about gameplay depth, not lore depth. An understandable mistake, but not relevant here. If we're gonna talk about gameplay depth, especially in terms of quest flavour, the series definitely peaked in Oblivion. If you want a happy medium I guess Morrowind's your best bet.

>Daggerfall had far more than that.
Not him but I think he was referring to the temple factions

>series peaked in Oblivion for gameplay depth
>no levitation
>no mysticism
>no spears
>half the guilds are complete shit, and there are only 4 of them

I know it was probably your first exposure to the TES series babby, but don't be retarded.

Oh, yeah, I kinda see what he means there. It's just poor wording.

>no levitation
Only valid point tbqh. I understand why they axed it but it's still lame and just another reason this series doesn't belong on consoles, that is unfortunately vastly outweighed by the counterpoint of, "$$$$$."

>no mysticism
You're thinking of Skyrim. Obliivon just lacks thaumaturgy, which Morrowind also lacks.

>no spears
Those aren't even gameplay depth, they're cosmetic depth. In Morrowind they are functionally no different from any other melee weapon except in slight adjustments to the attack rate and reach modifiers, where they're like a faster but weaker greatsword, because the combat is so archaic. At least in Oblivion you can mod spears with their own animations in and even have them have reasonable hitboxes. In both Morrowind and Skyrim that is, as far as I know, still impossible even with mods.

>half the guilds are complete shit, and there are only 4 of them
Which guilds do you think are shit, out of curiosity? Gonna go out on a limb and guess mages and fighters, simply on the basis that they aren't as brilliant as the stealth-themed guilds and a lot of people are understandably bitter about Mannimarco's treatment in the mages guild (though I'm pretty sure most of those people are either people, like me, that prefer Daggerfall, or people who look for any excuse to complain).

>I know it was probably your first exposure to the TES series babby
Daggerfall was.
>Morrowhiner this butthurt that someone more veteran thinks of his first game the same way he apparently thinks of Oblivion
How amusing!

>You're thinking of Skyrim. Obliivon just lacks thaumaturgy, which Morrowind also lacks.

My mistake.

>Those aren't even gameplay depth, they're cosmetic depth. In Morrowind they are functionally no different from any other melee weapon except in slight adjustments to the attack rate and reach modifiers, where they're like a faster but weaker greatsword, because the combat is so archaic. At least in Oblivion you can mod spears with their own animations in and even have them have reasonable hitboxes. In both Morrowind and Skyrim that is, as far as I know, still impossible even with mods.

Collapsing weapons into each other is losing depth.

>Which guilds do you think are shit, out of curiosity? Gonna go out on a limb and guess mages and fighters, simply on the basis that they aren't as brilliant as the stealth-themed guilds and a lot of people are understandably bitter about Mannimarco's treatment in the mages guild (though I'm pretty sure most of those people are either people, like me, that prefer Daggerfall, or people who look for any excuse to complain).

You guessed it right. But consider: oblivion's quest lines were shallow as shit for the most part, with you going from the new guy to guild leader in 2 or 3 days. The story in the Mages and Fighter's guilds sucked ass too. Morrowind had longer, and more in depth questlines in general.

>Morrowhiner this butthurt that someone more veteran thinks of his first game the same way he apparently thinks of Oblivion
I started with arena moron.

Which one Veeky Forums?

The only ones I can think of that haven't betrayed their servants are Malacath and Mehrunes Dagon.

>Collapsing weapons into each other is losing depth.
It isn't. This is a myth perpetuated by whiners who like to make-believe that Morrowind was the greatest game of all time. It is usually also applied to skills, which is ironic given that Daggerfall had something like twice as many skills as Morrowind.

The Morrowhiner thus confronted will usually reply with a phrase like, "m-m-muh language skills!" ignoring the hypocrisy- While some skills and weapon classifications were removed going from Morrowind to Oblivion, utility was generally gained rather than lost (with the exception of levitation and lock being removed). Even if you consider every language skill one collective lost skill, more was actually lost going from Daggerfall to Morrowind than from Morrowind to Oblivion, though Morrowind made up for that with its factions having actual, non-radiant quests (something Skyrim finally regressed on lmao).

The fact is, spears played no differently from any other weapon, and nothing that wasn't purely cosmetic was lost in removing them.

>oblivion's quest lines were shallow as shit for the most part, with you going from the new guy to guild leader in 2 or 3 days
Certainly not 2 or 3 in-game days. Sounds like you're thinking of Skyrim again.

Two of Oblivion's guild questlines (assassin's guild and fighter's guild) were very linear. Mage's was open ended as fuck to begin with and then got linear, following the pattern of Morrowind guilds, while thieves was fairly linear but was uniquely the only guild that had a sort of hidden progress bar based on your actions, meaning a major component was the actual open-ended experience of stealing and fencing shit to gain reputation. However, where Morrowind's factions were generally less linear, they were less linear in the same sense the mages guild in Oblivion is- You could do a couple of quests at each of a few locations, and once you'd done them all you could do the short chain of quests to become the guild head.

Boethia all the way baby

>posting a picture with meridia
thread rules say no waifus

I'm so fucking sorry, but I need to post this.
youtu.be/S9JDf8Ch5vE?list=FLF0cYWZMWhbtEk_qw57hG-A

>FEED ME MER
gets me every time, I miss when Brave wasn't a lame-o

Well, not "far" more, but it did have more gods mentioned in books. Ebonarm is probably the most famous as the god of war, and there's Jephre who later got expanded into Y'ffre. There was also that weird Blind God thing in the final dungeon which we never learned more about but was pretty cool looking. Ius was something of a meta-joke but that's a god too. Redguard's Pocket Guide and Morrowind's many religious texts added many many more gods and pantheons that were never even conceived of in Daggerfall's time, however.

If your point is that Daggerfall's lore is unfairly ignored by self-proclaimed TES lore buffs, then I'm right there with you. It is in many ways the genesis of Tamriel as we know it. Ted Peterson for his writings in Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion is by far the most important writer in the series, with the much-overrated Kirkbride landing second or third.

But it's a complete falsehood to say that Tamriel's lore at the time of Daggerfall was more complex or deep than Morrowind's. The fact that Daggerfall touched on so many concepts that only went into much greater depth later is exactly what the whole breadth and depth thing really means. Daggerfall threw a lot of ideas out there and Redguard, Morrowind, and to a lesser extent Oblivion and Skyrim took a bunch of them and fleshed them out.

It also bears mentioning that while Daggerfall did go into a lot of detail about Redguard history, the majority of it by the time of Morrowind was added in Redguard itself rather than lifted straight from Daggerfall's books as you suggest. Hunding and Leki were just names of heroes rather than the incarnation of a god and the namesake of a lesser Redguard deity, respectively. The Ra Gada and their eventual split into the Forebears vs. the traditional Crowns and then the nomadic Yokudans that cling to old traditions are all inventions of the game Redguard, not Daggerfall. Yokuda itself having been destroyed/sunk was also a post-Daggerfall invention.

pelinal lost but divayth's song made up for it

Pelin-el memes are the worst.

You lost? Elves aren't welcome here.

>mantling
No, that's totally a Morrowind thing. Daggerfall just had a book that described how Arkay used to be mortal. That's a very different concept than becoming so similar to an existing entity that the universe forgets your distinctions in the first place. You could make it fit Baan Dar, which was kind of a robinhood figure mentioned in Daggerfall who recruits people to take on his name and carry on his legacy, and those people then do the same to others. You can take the new concept of mantling and retroactively apply it to Daggerfall's more mundane apotheosis/anonymous hero stories, but in doing so you have to accept that the depth was added after Daggerfall, not during.

Likewise with Numidium, which was a massive golem powered by a dead battlemage's heart. The idea that it's a reality-denying construct that literally breaks time (and the resulting warp in the west that retroactively explained how Daggerfall's endings worked moving forward) is 100% Morrowind lore.

As for
>Conflict of the Imperial Cult with fringe cults
you're really stretching it, especially considering there was no Imperial Cult in Daggerfall but rather separate temples to each individual deity. Some of them were allied with each other and some were even enemies, with inter-faction relationships rerolling every in-game year. There were some fun quests in Daggerfall with false prophets and all that, and obviously witches exist, but very little about them is revealed in the game (they don't even have dialogue entries to ask about like most other factions) besides the fact that they can commune with Daedra.

Your accusation that all or most of Morrowind's lore - it being the game that ADDED more books to the series than any other including Daggerfall - is derivative of Daggerfall is completely empty. Unless you want to accept that all of Daggerfall's lore is derivative of Arena, that because Arena's manual mentioned "The Underking" all of Daggerfall's main quest must be unoriginal.

I want this so bad. I love mimics and often implement them in my table top games even when they're not official.

>with the much-overrated Kirkbride landing second or third.
I would say third, there's also Kuhlmann.

>The fact that Daggerfall touched on so many concepts that only went into much greater depth later is exactly what the whole breadth and depth thing really means.
I can see where you're coming from here, but really all they took and greatly expanded upon was the relationship of Anu/Padomay (and made everything about that) and the origin of Numidium. Every distinct culture, obliterated; Now they're all just arguing about whether Anu or Padomay is cooler. Minor religious sects? Maybe on ancient yokuda, fuck those! And god forbid anything NOT metaphysical have any depth whatsoever. Everybody knows counts and lords and so forth exist only as more centralised questgivers, any retard can walk into their courtroom and they'll speak to them as equals even if they're autistic mongoloids, and the deepest any intrigue goes is a strict Us versus Them, with one side clearly in the wrong except on like one REALLY CRUCIAL point (rather than crafting the story around something believable and intriguing- The cardinal rule of writing for post-Daggerfall TES seems to be "is it a shallow one-dimensional plot device?" If not, "Is it CHIM?" If not, fucking ditch it).

When you reuse one actually-pretty-basic concept or story over and over, the syncretism that arises can be interesting, but only in a wholly fleshed-out setting, which modern TES no longer is. What it is is extremely shallow, and actually a very lazy way to make sure you don't accidentally make your lore inconsistent- Which they fail in every game regardless, introducing pointless retcons that ultimately just make things lamer and more boring.

>And god forbid anything NOT metaphysical have any depth whatsoever. Everybody knows counts and lords and so forth exist only as more centralised questgivers, any retard can walk into their courtroom and they'll speak to them as equals even if they're autistic mongoloids, and the deepest any intrigue goes is a strict Us versus Them, with one side clearly in the wrong except on like one REALLY CRUCIAL point (rather than crafting the story around something believable and intriguing-
Dude, morrowind had a shit ton of depth to the politics.

I would bring back Golems.

>The fact is, spears played no differently from any other weapon, and nothing that wasn't purely cosmetic was lost in removing them.
This is completely wrong. Morrowind was actually the first game in the series to have any differences between weapons types the first place. In Daggerfall all weapons really were cosmetic except versus skeletons who were resistant to blades, and if you weren't using the one with the most damage you were simply using the wrong one. The directional attacks also had the same use between each weapon, leading to silly things like "thrusting" your flail or hammer for optimal accuracy. In Morrowind they all have different swing speed, fatigue cost, and optimal attack direction. For a handful of them that optimal direction will even change based on whether you're attacking lightly or fully charging - another mechanic that did not exist in Daggerfall where you had no control over the strength of your attacks. Morrowind's thrown weapons opened up the option for ranged + shield, which no other game in the series supports.

But this is a special point for spears because they had a unique quality among melee weapons in Morrowind: much longer range. Fighting optimally with a spear was a tactic that almost felt like jousting and was reminiscent to how all melee combat played in Daggerfall: Poke, retreat, poke, retreat, relying on the staggers and knockdowns to keep your enemy out of range.

As for the skill argument, Daggerfall did not have "twice as many" skills as Morrowind, it had eight more. Considering that nine of Daggerfall's skills were those languages you mentioned... well, you can do the math. Game mechanics are beyond the scope of this thread and this post is running out of space but it suffices to say that a lot more gameplay utility was gained in Morrowind from Daggerfall than in Oblivion from Morrowind.

Sload would have their own country and be a major political force and playable race.

>No, that's totally a Morrowind thing.
The Mantella is literally called that because it is the mantle that the Underking passes on, the stone bearing his divine soul. That is what I was referring to, not the apotheosis of Arkay. "Becoming so similar to an existing entity that the universe forgets your distinctions in the first place" also doesn't come from the games' lore at all, it's how mantling is usually described to people new to the lore so they'll get it. It is really just the station of godhood being ritually and officially handed down from a deity to a mortal (as happens in Shivering Isles), the misconception/overcomplication coming from Tiber Septim saying "walk like them until they must walk like you" in an apocryphal tidbit by MK. It is really just an allusion to the place the term "mantling" or "passing on the mantle" comes from IRL (2 Kings 2:13-16).

>The idea that it's a reality-denying construct that literally breaks time
Numidium as a golem that runs on the soul of a minor deity is just as impressive as "that, except it also fucks up time so we don't have to be creative or commit to anything, and I guess we also don't have to actually have dwarves now cus we can just say it wiped them out too instead of one clan of them being hunted by goblins haha."

>you're really stretching it, especially considering there was no Imperial Cult
They were still the central religious figures, with the others being heretical or heathen (including the Daedra). "The Imperial Cult" is a convenient moniker that is more wieldy than "the cults of the eight divines."

>Your accusation that all or most of Morrowind's lore - it being the game that ADDED more books to the series
Except almost everything it added is just about Anu and Padomay, plus the 36 lessons (which are also largely about anu and padomay). It took one minor, unusually cliche book from Daggerfall and made the whole setting about it.

>Dude, morrowind had a shit ton of depth to the politics.
I must have not turned over the single pointy volcanic stone most of it was hiding under then. All I saw was "all the houses hate the other houses... but they hate the empire more......... ur alright tho kid.."

>insane attention to detail and cohesion that Daggerfall's lore got
You can describe Daggerfall in a whole lot of ways, but "insane attention to detail" might be the furthest from the truth you could possibly choose, especially in comparison to any other TES game besides Arena and mobile spinoffs. Daggerfall is the definition of quantity over quality, having as many people, places, and things as an RPG can with as little detail, connections, and exploration of them as necessary.

>This is completely wrong. Morrowind was actually the first game in the series to have any differences between weapons types the first place.
>another mechanic that did not exist in Daggerfall where you had no control over the strength of your attacks.
Uh, no? In Morrowind different weapon types have different reach, attack speed and damage values on equivalent items (eg daedric items that are shorter/slower will usually have more damage). Unless you roll a very high-speed character (in which case spears are the best simply because their reach allows you to continue hitting an enemy while backpedaling out of their reach), the weapons all function the same- Walk up to an enemy, press m1, repeat until one of you is dead. In Daggerfall, the weapons differ by, you guess it, reach, attack speed and damage. Daggers attack very rapidly for light damage right on an enemy, warhammers move as if through syrup but can hit fairly far away and do large damage per hit.

In fact the one difference Morrowind DID add works exclusively to its detriment. Different weapon types get the most damage, with no accuracy penalty, with different types of attack. In Daggerfall, different attacks were instead a power/accuracy tradeoff, meaning there was an aspect of gambling and also strategising in terms of character build around it. Downward chops had shit accuracy but did huge damage- So if your agility was high enough to always hit regardless? Hell yeah, always use them. But early on when even a thief's agility is low, eh, consider stabbing so you're actually doing consistent damage... Unless the enemy is dangerous and you need to kill it in one hit or not at all. Morrowind has none of that, because every weapon has one optimal attack, so it is all just spam m1.

Seriously, I'm shocked that you deign to argue on this subject when you didn't know the different attacks in Daggerfall are a power/accuracy tradeoff, that's some really basic shit.

>As for the skill argument, Daggerfall did not have "twice as many" skills as Morrowind, it had eight more.
My bad, it's been a minute since I've actually seen someone bring up the "streamlining is bad" argument in Morrowind's favour so it's also been a while since I've compared them. The point about hypocrisy remains- Condensing such "redundant" skills that do the same exact thing but in cosmetically different situations, by my figuring Daggerfall has 20 practical skills while Morrowind has 18 and Oblivion has 18.

Oblivion also had...
>a dodge button
>active blocking
>a minigame, however shitty, for speechcraft, instead of just spamming a mouseclick
>weapon movesets (ie different things with different hitboxes and effects you can do with weapons besides just damage taps ad nauseum)
>skill-dependent perks (eg skipping across water, parrying, dodging, aerial combat)
>arrow physics, generally better ranged options in every way
>magic that wasn't the least intuitive shit to actually use (maybe you don't remember playing Morrowind without the fanmade code patch, but I do)
and what I was originally talking about, which is way, way better sidequests and quest writing, since it was a question of Daggerfall's knightly orders being just the bullshit Toddler now sells as "radiant" as compared to Morrowind at least having a small unique blurb about each of the (mostly functionally identical) fetch quests you do for all the guilds.

What did Morrowind actually ADD compared to Daggerfall, rather than taking away? Apart from the sidequest dialogue thing, obviously. Everything you listed already is false, and I'm having trouble coming up with anything to play double's advocate, so...

What dodge button? What did the different power attacks do besides damage taps? Aerial combat? I'm pretty sure you're talking about modded oblivion.

>In Daggerfall, the weapons differ by, you guess it, reach, attack speed and damage. Daggers attack very rapidly for light damage right on an enemy, warhammers move as if through syrup but can hit fairly far away and do large damage per hit.
I'm sorry, but literally every single thing you just said here is a lie. Maybe you were simply mistaken or have memory-merged with the later games, but all Daggerfall weapons have the same reach and attack speed - only your Speed attribute affects that. The only difference is damage (and again, whether they're bladed or not in the case of skeletons). Daggers being fast and warhammers being slow and all the weapons in between is a mechanic first introduced in Morrowind and carried over to all later games. In Daggerfall the only difference between using your fists, a dagger, or a two-handed war axe is the damage per swing.

>Seriously, I'm shocked that you deign to argue on this subject when you didn't know the different attacks in Daggerfall are a power/accuracy tradeoff, that's some really basic shit.
I don't know where you got that idea or if you even read my post. Did you not see:
>The directional attacks also had the same use between each weapon, leading to silly things like "thrusting" your flail or hammer for optimal accuracy.

The dodge button unlocks with an acrobatics perk. Power attacks can paralyze or disarm and maybe some other effects I've forgotten.

and the aerial combat? None of the things you've mentioned so far actually changed gameplay in oblivion. most of them were worthless.

I don't really think golems have been removed from the lore, they're just not needed with Centurions and Atronachs already there.

>What dodge button?
Block and jump while holding a direction with sufficiently high acrobatics. It's a monster hunter style tucknroll. People overlook it probably because 1: it requires 50+ in acrobatics and 2: like every bit of advice on the internet for the game is "don't reply to acrobatics, hide acrobatics from major skills, report acrobats." Acrobatics is also the skill that allows you to skip across liquids, not just water but lava too, and jump high enough to clear most enemies' heads. Acrobatics was godtier in Oblivion.

>What did the different power attacks do besides damage taps?
Forward power attacks could paralyze, backward power attacks could knock opponents down, sideways power attacks could disarm them. Also reliant on perks, or else they would just be different animations.

>Aerial combat?
Until you have 25+ acrobatics you cannot attack in midair. You gain the ability to do aerial power attacks at the same time you gain the dodge roll, 50+.

This is all vanilla. Go check the skill pages on UESP if you're too gay to try it in-game, at least with console commands or something.

>Maybe you were simply mistaken or have memory-merged with the later games, but all Daggerfall weapons have the same reach and attack speed - only your Speed attribute affects that.
I was literally playing this morning and could have sworn you were wrong but yeah, you're right on that, just tested it out.

>I don't know where you got that idea or if you even read my post. Did you not see:
skimming and the fact that you said
>For a handful of them that optimal direction will even change based on whether you're attacking lightly or fully charging - another mechanic that did not exist in Daggerfall where you had no control over the strength of your attacks.
Though I see now that I misunderstood and you were talking about power vs light attacks (which are like a dumbed down version of the three attacks Daggerfall had).

>dodge button
Yeah, that sucks. There's never a situation where you are better off dodging instead of moving to the side normally while blocking.
>walking across water
Yeah, a spell you can get at novice level lets you do that anyways
>aerial combat
Oh, you meant jumping and attacking. No, that wasn't useful.
Acrobatics was shit.

>There's never a situation where you are better off dodging instead of moving to the side normally while blocking.
Except using a bow or other twohander and, you know, getting out of the way of a weapon swing. It's not even hard against slower weapons.

>Yeah, a spell you can get at novice level lets you do that anyways
It's another option, and one that is not nearly as cool or player skill based. More importantly, it doesn't let you skip across lava without taking damage.

Unsurprisingly, like most people that claim Oblivion is so much worse than Morrowind in every conceivable way, you appear to have never actually played it. Go figure.

Not that guy, but I played Oblivion and can confirm it's shit. The Oblivion gates were cool the first time or two, but other than that it's constant dialogue about mudcrabs, potato head models, playing second fiddle to the actual main character, no custom spells/enchantments out of the gate, short guild storylines, etc. etc. etc.

The Dwemer armor design was pretty neat, and the combat does feel more visceral/reactive/meaty than Skyrim's, but that's not really saying a lot.

There's like two opportunities where you raid a gate with other guards.
There should have been more of that. Especially since more patrols are on the roads now.

>Daggerfall has more depth than Morrowind

It's been a VERY long time since I played oblivion but I didn't think it felt very meaty.

Still made you feel superhuman, though not quite as superhuman as Morrowind. And you're forgetting the lava-skipping part.

Okay. Oblivion gave you the ability to jump on water and took away the ability to jump over mountains, lakes, rivers, walls, and everything else. Not worth it.

The reduction in magical ways to boost acrobatics *DID* suck. (Is it even theoretically possible with mods by the way? Or did fortifyacrobatics not do anything past a certain cap?)

>took away the ability to jump over mountains, lakes, rivers, walls, and everything else
It didn't. You can still boost stats far past 100 with alchemy. In fact the only games you can't do that in are Arena and Skyrim. And Skyrim has an alternate method that's a lot longer and more tedious, though it doesn't have an acrobatics skill to boost. The "fact" that that was taken out is just more misinfo from poorly-informed morrowhiners.

youtube.com/watch?v=JBY6mlvB9B4
this is officially the least shitty oblivion superjump video in existence as verified by me searching for like two whole minutes, skip to like 2:25 for the good stuff. Not sure if it still does but back then UESP even had guides on doing the superjump and other absurd combo spells that let you break reality on touch. IIRC with spell loops you can reach far more busted values than these as well.

In Skyrim you can no longer do a superjump on console since there's no acrobatics skill, unless you set up something really wacky and clever (iirc there's a way to reflect magic on yourself and combine the freeze shout with a well timed jump to sort of physics glitch into the sky forever, or maybe it's just getting hit by the shout from a dragon priest that can do it), but since its method to boost skills far past the point they're intended to be boosted involves enchanting, you get the effects permanently. Basically console-free godmode, complete with 0 shout cooldown.

Admittedly he was probably talking about the Scroll of Icarian Flight as if it's not a fucking easter egg as opposed to a mechanic WAD

IIRC the only ways to boost past 100 in oblivion are glitches.

Morrowind had the jump spell, and fortify acrobatics, both of which enabled jumping over the mountains of vvardenfell without resorting to gameplay bugs.

I honestly just consoled myself scrolls because I'm a lazy piece of shit who missed his babbymode fast travel (I almost never used them to explore *NEW* places, just places I'd already been.) and I didn't want to use recursive alchemy.

Only if you consider looping fortification effects to get insane stat values to be a glitch. Which, incidentally, is also the way it was usually done in morrowind.

I may be misremembering for daggerfall because I also remember you could absorb your own aoe destruction spells for infinite magicka, so I might just be thinking of that + levitate to fly forever.

I always just install the mod that gives you multiple mark/recalls now. Doing a playthrough where you get the physical map out and actually look at it to plan a course and keep notes on which towns have which transport going to where is pretty fun and immersive once or twice but since then it's just been a drag that makes me want to put the game down even faster.

No, the only method to do it in oblivion was the following:
en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Spell_Making#Spell_Stacking

Notably, this method was considered a bug, and removed.

Fortify wouldn't work to enable super jumping (or the kinds of jumping shenanigans you can do in Morrowind). Fortify Skill doesn't have any effect past 100 on every skill except for Athletics and Acrobatics. This means it is impossible to establish a fortify skill loop past a certain point, without using the weakness to magicka exploit.

Learn your shit.

I'm positive that's false, because I played Oblivion late (2009) and on the most recent patch at the time I could still superjump and cross the continent in a few seconds (not including ridiculous buffering times) by fortifying speed and acrobatics. You say skill, does it apply the same limit to attributes? Because speed also influences jump height iirc.

But it DOES still work on Acrobatics and Athletics?

Okay, nevermind, I see what you're saying. Not impossible to boost acrobatics that high, just "impossible" to loop fortify attribute that high without the weakness to magicka stack.

Except the video I linked does not use that method, and if it was patched out, obviously neither did I.

yes, but without establishing a loop, you can't fortify acrobatics high enough to produce a super jump.

The video you linked does show the method used. He shows his active magic effects, which include weakness to magic, fortify acrobatics, athletics, and speed. He clearly used the weakness to magicka bug. And you either don't remember using it (likely, memory is faulty), cheated with a mod, or weren't playing a fully up to date game.

What is/was the loop?

Definitely not a mod, I didn't start fucking with mods in Oblivion until like a month before Skyrim came out. Not up to date I doubt but I guess it's possible? I'd go test it now but my current installs are both heavily modded.

>Loop 1:
>Weakness to Magic 100% for 5 secs on Self
>Loop 2:
>Weakness to Magic 100% for 5 secs on Self
>Boost Spell:
>Weakness to Frost 3% for 1 secs on Self
>Fortify Health 50 pts for 120 secs on Self

Cast Loop 1 and 2 alternating between them for a few times. They each get boosted by the other's weakness to magicka because of an oversight. Each time your weakness to magicka jumps up an absurd amount, until you're in the thousands, or tens of thousands. Then cast the boost spell. Because the boost spell is technically harmful, all of its effects get amplified by the weakness to magicka, including the beneficial ones. You end up with an arbitrarily high number of whatever stat you boosted.

Later, Bethesda patched it so weakness to magicka doesn't amplify self casted spells.

That's a shame, also damn risky if you get nailed with frost.

Boethiah is indeed the Anticipation of Vivec, yeah? Or is that Mephala?

Mephala -> Vivec
Boethiah -> Almalexia
Azura -> Sotha Sil

>game mechanic autism
Please fuck off back to Veeky Forums.

From what I gater, High Rock has:
- Bjoulsae Nomads
- Western Reachmen
- Tribal Orcs
- Neo-orcs
- Isolated High Elven clans
as distinct ethnic/cultural minorities.
Other than that though:

>Although the Bretons are divided into numerous mutually antagonistic factions, to the outsider a singular uniformity in dress, architecture, and customs prevails throughout the land. Bretons are not an imaginative people, a legacy of the Elves, perhaps, and traditional ways are not lightly abandoned. Their villages are pleasant collections of half-timbered structures of one or two stories, with the rustic inn, a shop or two, and perhaps a lordly manor completing the picture. The traveler need not visit more than a handful of Breton communities before satisfying himself that he has captured the flavor of the whole. The people, too, despite their cherished particularism, are remarkably similar in name, accent, and dress throughout the province. It may be that this unacknowledged homogeneity bodes well for the future harmony of High Rock.

Skyrim sort of messed up the symbolism by having boethiah represented as female. Mephala is not explicitly male or female, though she is generally regarded as more feminine than masculine the same way Vivec is neither but is generally regarded as more masculine than feminine, while seht and ayem are matched with the princes of the opposite gender.

Thank you. I nearly forgot those ...precursors due to my love of ALMSIVI

>worshipping the Three-Faced Devil
Veloth weeps for you.

>Skyrim sort of messed up the symbolism by having boethiah represented as female.
Does Skyrim interpretation even matter? Might just be a regional difference.

>The only ones I can think of that haven't betrayed their servants are Malacath and Mehrunes Dagon.
Malacath has been tricked into betraying his own son.

And have a look at Mankar Camoran's "Paradise."

Golems were more or less shoved out of the lore in favor of atronachs as early as Daggerfall. You get the occasional use of the term when referring to Dwemer constructs like Numidium, but that's it.
I don't even care if they're made out to be an abandoned practice or something, I just want them to be fucking acknowledged in someway.

Meridia is the only one worth your time, maybe Azura. Everyone else will fuck you over eventually but in truth they all fucking suck, each and every one of them.

Boethiah has been refered to as female all the way back in Daggerfall.
en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Invocation_of_Azura_(Daggerfall)

>it's how mantling is usually described to people new to the lore so they'll get it.
But that's literally more obtuse than the simple inheritance you described, and also doesn't exactly apply to the Nerevarine's retroactive soul-share.